


fall of the towers

by macha



Series: Georgia on My Mind [23]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-08
Updated: 2007-05-08
Packaged: 2017-10-18 11:50:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macha/pseuds/macha





	fall of the towers

###    
_B04.10.01 DragonLord Wars: in the hunt, we are hunter._   


and the name of the tale is:

  


### Fall of the Towers

  


I saw the Fall of the Towers in Obergesmund. Silhouetted against the three suns of the Andean system, they had stood for at least a million years, an indestructible symbol of eternity. You could see them with the naked eye all the way from Dies Irae Station. And they might be standing yet except that she raised her arm on that hilltop and let it fall, making her hard and final judgment, and in response they crumbled into dust. The Slayer in Battle, serving up notice that she still quite properly did her own dusting in the field. She never gives an inch, in war, in love, in life. Magnificent she is, always ascending. And there's yet another poem I never wrote.

To be honest, I've got a lot of fond memories of that particular war, though I doubt the Slayer could say the same. We were blessed throughout with a fine supply of Pandemundran sappers I'd dug up earlier on a garbage recruitment run. Demolition, there's something about it that still speaks to me as a way of life, or at least a way of looking at life (though with that particular lot it was naturally reinforced by their compound five-eyed view of the worlds). Willow said once I might have been a darn good engineer if only I'd studied up, but she had that gleam in her eye that said she was only kidding, and anyway i made her take it back.

At any rate, the Pandes and me, we'd had some fine times in that war, whenever our paths happened to cross. I still remember vividly the rush of riding the Auldgust rapids with them. That was the decade before we managed to fight our way to Obergesmund. An impossible stunt, those rapids, or at least it was supposed to be. We careened heads-first all the way down to Mirabilis Maxcor that night in the dark, to mine the Sundrench Bridge before we cut at daybreak the comlines and set that cometary city free.

In fact, I've still got the two-man flyer they decided to build me when we were celebrating that victory in a long succession of freespace bars. I can't say the bars in question proved to be as sturdy as the new ship, once they'd recycled so many of the bars' best parts. Darla gave me a dressing down later about how the laws of salvage didn't apply planetside. But we'd decided all of those establishments needed extensive renovations anyhow to make them fit for a lady to enter, and we all felt certain the Slayer was on my trail that night. So it kept us hopping, staying just that bit ahead of her all the way, laying out all those welcome mats in turn while we faded back.

The resulting ship looks a bit ramshackle, maybe; right, more like a state of advanced decay. Bit hard to say if that's the way the Pandes meant it to be, or whether it was their metabolic reaction to Therulian whiskey, which apparently they'd never encountered before. There were plenty of parts left over when they were done, which might have given pause to a bloke naturally inclined to take the glass half empty view, but being I wasn't, I only wondered whether some of those parts were part of them. Then i congratulated myself just a bit for the note of concern. The things I've done for her, I should be only a shadow of my former self.

I christened the ship Pandemonium on the spot, after the makers. Called in the cavalry to get it home, avoided Buffy's eye for a day or two while I nursed the headache, and I've done my share of both fishing and black-ops in that vessel ever since. They called it a stealth ship, which was not too bloody likely, at least in the circles I travel in, but then again subtle wouldn't really be much like me. It sounds like the getaway car after the wedding, but when you're playing The Ramones on the Wurlitzer jukebox on the bridge, that drowns out everything, including the warning sirens. The kids all call it The Garbage Scow, when they think i can't hear them, but I notice they're all quick to offer to come with me whenever I look like I might be heading out.

First thing I always teach them is how to bellow along with that "living in Queens / eating refried beans" bit. Seeing to their education, like: gotta know their history, so they don't repeat it. Could have been born planetside, after all, things had gone different. Perspective matters. They fall about laughing at the very notion, truth to tell. Born to be spacers, and that's a fact. Occasionally Buffy reminds me I, on the other hand, was born to be spaced. But thinking of dear departed William, it's hard to avoid having a bit of a chuckle imagining how well poor Will would do with the very idea of sailing out into the multiverse without a manual - though admittedly with plenty to translate.

The Fall of the Towers, though, that was the final stand of the Diacratic Empire. The Dragon Lords of the Fourteenth Age fell with the towers, dispersed into constituent atoms and even smaller splits, and thousands of worlds in the darkmatter void of the Exelian system were in that instant finally set free. What are we really made of? Frogs and snails and puppy dog's tails. Dust and dark matter, right, for me that might be a fair estimation after all.

Funny thing, though, if you really think about that with me in the frame. After all, how many times in those early days in Sunnydale should she have been dusting me? I live every day by the grace of a spate of blind luck, combined with the unknown niceties of her (much) better judgment. To stay her hand, or slay, in the end are always her choices; i don't envy her the gig cause i only have to look at her to see how much it sometimes hurts. And I still wish i could have spared her that with me, but all that's water under a whole host of bridges i like to think we've both blown up together.

When I think of time passing, though (which isn't often), I see that image still: the towers, the suns, the empty space that followed after. Dawn keeps the shiplogs faithfully, so as galactic history it's well documented off her primary account. And what it stood for is not forgotten. Plenty of paintings, music, plays, in many different cultures, in alternate timestreams, commemorate that moment, cause it was one that mattered, as it matters still. But more or less, I'm still a not-so-bad poet, inside a not-so-good man, and the thing itself was lyrical in its own way, that moment when they fell. All those renditions are usually meant to do her honor, though, so Buffy and I both praise the likeness dutifully whenever they are presented. But just between us none of those depictions speak to me: what we saw, maybe even what it meant, was different, because we were there. It's always different, especially when i can see it through her eyes.

And truth to tell, even while I was standing there I admired the crumble, whereas she mourned the end. I reckon it defines the difference between us. But probably knowing that, she stood there with me just the same. What it comes down to, I've decided, mulling it over, there are two ways of seeing both life and time: we register decay, or we measure endings. Are we both in time, then, or out of time? No way to know for sure, without a promised end. I did ask Georgia, but she tells me it just won't translate. It doesn't matter, really, long as we're together.

I knew how much it cost her to make that call at Obergesmund. Unlike the final verdict of history, she viewed it as a defeat rather than a victory. But all she said then when she reached out blindly, knowing I'd be there, was "Do we have the right to erase such beauty from the galaxies?" I suppose Willow might have told her she had a duty, and it would have been true as far as it went. Me, i just held her hand, and we watched them fall.


End file.
